Responding to Terrorism

Arun Shourie

From our experience over the last
twenty years the following emerge as self- evident axioms.

1. The technology of inflicting
large-scale violence is becoming easier to obtain, and - per
quotient of lethality - less and less expensive. This in turn
yields three lemmas:

The target country has to be equipped to counter
the entire spectrum of violence: to take the current examples
from the United States - from aircraft being used as missiles
to anthrax;

It is almost impossible in an open society
to block a determined lot from acquiring the technology they
want by blocking the technology itself - the only practical
way is to be a leap ahead of the technology the terrorist acquires;

All this is certain to cost the target country
a great deal - but that is the price one has to pay to survive
in the world of today; to cavil at it is no better than an elderly
couple that grudges the locks they have to put on doors in a
city marred by crimes against the elderly.

2. As the technology of
violence has become more and more lethal and as it has been
miniaturized, the final act can be done by just a handful, indeed
just by an individual acting alone. That individual can bide
his time. He can choose his place. He has to succeed just once.
For that reason, it is not possible to completely insulate a
country from the depredations of the terrorist. Superior intelligence
is obviously the key to making things more difficult for the
terrorist. But just as important is what the targeted society
does in the wake of die attack: overwhelming, and visibly overwhelming
reprisal alone will deter others from emulating the terrorist
who gets through. Potential recruits, as well as the controllers
of organizations and countries that backed him must be personally
touched by the retaliatory measures.

3. While the final act can
be executed by even a single individual, the terrorist requires,
terrorism as a means cannot do without an extensive network;
from nurseries that indoctrinate youngsters and forge them into
lobotomized killing machines, safe-houses, couriers, informers,
suppliers of weapons and explosives, those who will carry on
businesses to earn the money needed for ammunition and arms,
and the rest.

4. By now there are very many groups that
have taken to terrorism.

5. They are increasingly
intertwined: in India, as well as the world over - look at the
range of locations from which persons were picked up in the
wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The knitting together comes about in many ways. Groups in India
are encouraged by agencies hostile to India to coordinate their
activities; for instance, the ISI has been putting Naxalite
groups, the various groups operating in the North East in touch
with each other. Often the groups are brought together by "natural"
factors; for instance, both groups may be running drugs - they
may become couriers, suppliers, customers of each other; they
may be securing arms for an arms supplier - and through him
they may get to know each other; they may be using the same
agents or routes for money laundering....

6. Among the technologies
the terrorists have mastered is that of using the instruments
of mass media. They use these to arouse sympathy for their cause
— look at the shrewd way in which Hamas in Palestine, the Taliban
in Afghanistan generate revulsion at what their opponents do
by giving selective access to Western media to photograph civilian
casualties. They are as adept at using the mass media as Greens
and other activists for creating the echo-effect that so often
leads policy makers to desist from taking stem measures.

7. "They are wrong-headed,"
many in Punjab used to say of Bhindranwale1
and his men, "but you can't deny their idealism, their
readiness to die for what they think is right." The reality
is altogether different- Terrorism has become lucrative business:
in the Northeast, for instance, joining one of the terrorist
organizations is a sure way to rake in a minor fortune - the
proceeds from the "taxes" the organizations collect,
the ransom they extract from kidnapping. The terrorists strive
hard to cover their loot under the cloak of ideological, even
idealist rhetoric: recall the religious rant of the terrorists
in Punjab, and the reality behind it - what they were doing
to young girls across the state, the properties that their leaders
had amassed. Just as the terrorists strain to hide their loot,
the State and society must bare the truth about them.

8. To de-fang the terrorist
the country has to move on many fronts: their sources of money,
those who give them facilities to stay and stage their operations,
their sources of weapons and explosives, the network of their
couriers. And me moves against these multiple targets have to
be carried through simultaneously.

9. For these measures to
succeed, all institutions of the State have to act in the same
direction, indeed they have to work in concert. For the police
to capture terrorists and for the courts to function the way
our courts do, for them to go on using norms devised for quieter
times, for the Army to track down caches of explosives while
the customs men let in RDX - is to hand victory to the terrorists.

10. The lemma is inescapable:
we cannot have a flabby State, a somnolent society and a super-efficient
anti-terrorist operation. That no one gets convicted for the
Bombay blasts2 for eight years is certain to
encourage scores to sign up. Customs officers who take bribes
for letting in gold one day are certain to overlook arms' consignments
tomorrow. Police personnel who let Bangladeshis smuggle themselves
across the border in return for bribes will constitute no obstacle
to agents of the ISI making their way into the country.

Imagine what would happen if
Osama bin Laden slips out of Afghanistan. If he made his way
into Iran or China, the international alliance would be confident
that he can be executed without any one knowing. If he went
to one of the Central Asian countries, the allies would be confident
that, if they wanted him for trial, he would be handed over.
If he escaped into Pakistan, the allies would be confident that
Pakistan could deliver either solution - hand him over or have
his vehicle fall off a cliff in an accident. But what if he
escaped into India? Acrimonious debates would explode. Should
he be tried under the Indian Evidence Act or under the provisions
of POTO?3 By ordinary courts or a Special Court?
Is the Government not acting under American dictates as to what
we should do? His rights as an under-trial...... Another hijacking
.....fulsome focus on the wailing of relatives of the passengers....
Released in exchange for letting the passengers go.....

11. Not just the formal institutions
of the State, society must act to that end - that is, the overwhelming
number of individuals must be acting m concert independently
of or in support of what the State is doing. The State apparatus
on its own can no longer stem the Bangladeshis' demographic
invasion.4 It can only be staunched by creating
that atmosphere in the Northeast which will convince the potential
infiltrator that he better stay away from this region, as it
is hostile territory, a territory in which he is certain to
lose life and limb.

12. Not just society in general,
the ordinary, individual citizen too must be acting in concert
with the authorities. The passenger who kicks up a fuss when
he is frisked at an airport, the house-owner who insists that
being advised to inform die neighbourhood police station about
the new tenant is an intrusion into his private affairs - such
individuals unwittingly help terrorism: on the one hand, the
terrorist has an easier time establishing the safe-house from
which he will carry out his next explosion; on the other, the
average policeman is discouraged from doing his assigned duty.

13.For any of this to happen,
the balance of discourse has to be reversed, literally reversed
in India. Under POTO, die terrorists' lawyer is to have me right
to meet him during interrogations. Under it a policeman doing
his duty can be tried on me charge that he misused his authority
and he can be imprisoned for up to two years - even if he is
not convicted in die end, rushing from court to court, as die
Punjab policemen are doing today, will be enough. Such are die
provisions, and yet die Ordinance is being pilloried out of
shape. Esoteric distinctions are being made: the Ordinance provides
that me terrorist's property can be seized. "But that should
be, ‘property acquired by him from the proceeds of terrorism’.
It would be unfair to seize property dial he or his relatives
may have acquired by legitimate means." How will we fight
terrorism with this mind-set?

14. Temporary expedients
will boomerang: giving handsome amounts to me SULPA5
cadre, giving them jobs, allowing them to retain weapons - these
steps have resulted in Assam now having not one set of extortionists
- ULFA6 - but two. For the same reason, were
the USA, for instance, to do what news reports suggest it is
considering doing - delivering a package of 7 billion dollars
to a society and State as heavily Tahbamsed as Pakistan - it
would only be compounding the problem - for neighbours of Pakistan
in the immediate future, and for itself eventually. Events have
repeatedly thrown up this lesson, and yet few heed it. One reason
surely is that those who have a resource - say, money - or are
particularly good at one thing - say, technology - instinctively
think that that particular resource is what will do the trick.

15. The terrorist must be
defeated at every turn, in every engagement. While contending
with the IRA youth, Mrs. Thatcher rightly said, "Publicity
is the oxygen on which the terrorist lives," Success is
the food on which he multiplies: the strikes against the World
Trade Center Towers will live in terrorist mythology for decades,
they will lure recruits to lethal organizations for long. If
the terrorist is able to, execute an operation successfully,
he, his organization, their sponsors must be subjected to punitive
retaliation of such an order that all of them down me line feel
the costs of having inflicted the violence they did. In this
matter, we must remember

There is no kind way to prosecute a war;
war is death and destruction, it is blood and gore.

Those who recoil from what war
entails should mobilize the people at the first sign of extremist
ideology so that the terrorists are forestalled, and the State
does not ultimately have to move against them - in fact, the
kind who shout the loudest once war begins are the very kind
who in the preceding years have lent a verisimilitude of legitimacy
to the fabrications of such groups.

No war has been won by deploying "minimum
force" - the quantum that liberals concede when the terrorist
leaves them no option but to allow that something just has to
be done. Wars are won by over-powering the opponent with over-whelming
force. And so it must be in me case of terrorism, and of the
States that sponsor it: not "an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth"; for an eye, both eyes, for a tooth, the whole
jaw.

16. The next lesson too is so
obvious that its disregard can only be taken to be deliberate:
it is a fatal error to judge what needs to be done in an area
or in times infested by terrorists, by standards honed from
normal places and quieter times. No judge, no human rights organization
that today gives lectures about the conduct of the Police in
Punjab has set out how the Police was to prosecute the war when
the entire judicial system had literally evaporated: magistrates
were in mortal dread of terrorists, witnesses - even those who
had seen those dearest to them being gunned down in front of
their eyes - would not, they could not come forth to testify
without risking their lives. Far from falling prey to such specious
assumptions, such habitual hectoring, we should beware of the
oft- proclaimed device of extremist groups and movements: to
use the instruments of democracy to destroy democracy. We should
bear in mind Hitler's "legality oath" - he had sworn
that die Nazis would use only legal means to attain power; he
stuck to the oath. We should declare openly: yes, we will heed
the rights of terrorists — but only to the extent to which they
heed the rights of their victims.

17. Their access to arms,
to money etc. is important, but even more consequential is the
ideology of the terrorists: this is what fires them, by internalizing
which they become killing machines; this is what beguiles ordinary
by-standers into supporting them. More than anything else, this
ideology must be exhumed. To accomplish this, there are four
things to shun, and six to do.

Shun pseudo explanations. "Unemployment,
specially among the educated youth" - each time terrorism
erupts, it is attributed to some figment such as this. Unemployment
was no higher in Punjab than elsewhere in the early 1980s -
terrorism erupted there and not in, say, Bihar, because Pakistan
saw and seized the opportunity that the lunacy of our local
politicians had presented: to gain a leg over the Akalis, the
Congress leaders had patronized Bhindranwale; he went out of
hand; Pakistan took over the bunch around him. Similarly, unemployment
is no less in Punjab today than it was then, but there is no
terrorism - because Pakistan's design was crushed. What spurred
terrorism in Punjab, what spurs it today in Kashmir, in the
Northeast is not unemployment - but opportunity: we have created
an open, unobstructed field for the enemy. A country seeing
that the one it views as its enemy has blinkered its eyes, that
it has tied its hands, shackled its legs, sealed its lips -
as we have - shall not let the opportunity pass: victory is
at hand, it will convince itself.

For the same reason, shun pseudo-remedies. "But we must get to the roots of their anger/' many an
analyst writes today. And deduces that India, Israel or Russia
just must make some concession or the other on Kashmir, Palestine
or Chechnya. But the "anger" has not been triggered
by issues of this kind. It is the result of indoctrination,
its roots lie not in Chechnya and Kashmir but in the Quran,
the hadis, in what is drilled into their wards by madrasas.
Similarly, on the assumption that it is inadequate development
which is fueling terrorism in an area - say, Kashmir or the
Northeast - governments are apt to conclude that the remedy
is to pump more money into the region, or give further incentives
for industrialists to set up shop mere. The money just goes
to the terrorists. The people, and even more so the rulers of
the area sense that terrorism brings lucre; they develop an
immediate, mercenary reason for keeping the area in ferment.
Crushing defeat, not more money is the remedy.

Beware of rationalisers. They come bi two sets:
the liberals, and the professional propagandists. The tatters'
efforts are well known, though liberal societies invariably
underestimate the sophistication of their techniques, as well
as their gall: in reading their tracts, for instance, the average
person is liable to think that he has insulated himself by discounting
their claims a bit; confident that he has taken the requisite
prophylactic, he becomes all the more susceptible to the 100
per cent fabrication. The liberal apologists are much more destructive:
they are more numerous; as they are "people like us,"
their formulations and rationalizations are more readily believed.
"No religion teaches the killing of innocents," says
the liberal apologist today'- a cliche that turns on what is
meant by the word "innocent", a meaning the liberal
never spells out with reference to the text. For instance, is
the person to whom the doctrine of that religion or of that
group has been offered, and who does not embrace it, "innocent"?
Innocent not in the eyes of the liberal apologist, but in the
eyes of that religion or text. "God says in the holy book,"
the liberal bleats, "'To you your religion, to me mine';
God declares, 'There is no compulsion in religion'." But
that is but a microscopic fraction of what the text says. Nor
does the liberal ever recall the very specific context in which
such - stray - phrases occur in the text. Recall the efforts
of the apologists for Communism to whitewash the reality with
essays about the "Early Marx", about the "Paris
Manuscripts".

Shun political correctness. Few things have
prevented the West from waking up in time to the dangers that
Islamic terrorism today constitutes for it as notions of what
is politically correct. These notions have stifled scholarship,
they have stifled discourse. They have led the West to shut
its eyes to the ideology by which the terrorists were being
fired up. The verbal terrorism by which notions of what is correct
and what is not the dominant intellectual group in India - me
leftists - has enforced the norms has disabled the ruling groups,
and, through them, the country to the point of paralysis. Standing
up to mat verbal terrorism, liberating discourse from those
notions is the first requisite of fighting the war against terrorism
in India.

Corresponding to these four "don'ts",
are six "do's";

Believe what the ideologues and organizations
of the terrorists say. The one thing for which ideologues and
organizations can be credited is that they are absolutely explicit
about their aims and objectives. The fault - the fatal fault
- is that of liberal societies: to this day they continue to
shut their eyes to what these organizations proclaim to be their
aim; domination, conquest, conversion of the dar ul harb
into the dar ul Islam - exactly as they had shut
their' eyes to Hitler in the 1930s and to Stalin later. Read
their press, reflect over their books and pamphlets, and act
in time - that is, before they have wreaked the havoc
they proclaim they will.

To combat a belief-system one must have a thorough
knowledge of me scriptures of mat ideology: during me early
1980s, propagandists start asserting, "Sikhism is closer
to Islam than to Hinduism;" how can one counter the poison
unless one has deep and intimate knowledge of the Granth
Sahib, unless one knows what the Gurus fought for and against
whom they fought? Commentator after commentator has been referring
to the Taliban as Deobandis, he has been recounting how they
were minted at the Binauri madrasa in Karachi. But unless
we know what the Dar ul Uloom in Deoband has been churning
out we will be easily deflected from grasping what has been
forged in those factories of hatred. Similarly, unless we have
liberated ourselves from the shackles of political correctness
sufficiently to broadcast what these religious seminaries have
put out, and are putting out to this day, how will we
awaken citizens to the danger that faces them?

Go by what the scripture as a whole says, not
by what a stray passage plucked from it says - what will determine
the outcome is the mind which the scripture, the tradition creates,
and this will be determined by the teaching as a whole, not
by a stray passage.

Go by the plain meaning of the scripture, not
by the construction that apologists and commentators contrive
to put on it: again, it is by the plain meaning of the scripture
that the faithful will proceed, not by the convolutions of some
liberal: will the Muslim go by the Quran or by Maulana Azad's
Tarjuman al Quran?

Go by what those who are recognised by that
group as authorities say about the ideology - the CPSU in Stalin's
Russia, the ulema in Islamic groups and States; not by
what some columnist or retired politician says. Often great
effort is expended in securing press statements that support
the anti-terrorist campaign - on occasion even a fatwa has
been procured to that effect. These are useless. Those who issue
them are dismissed as "sarkari sants", their
statements are rejected as command performances. This rejection
reflex is deeply, and consciously instilled into members of
such groups, indeed into the communities themselves. If someone
who is not a member of the group - if he is not a Communist,
if he is not a Muslim - his critique will be rejected automatically:
what else can you expect from that "agent of imperialism"
in one case, from that "enemy of the Faith" in the
other. On the other hand, no believer will raise questions of
any consequence - neither about the basic approach of the group
nor about, to take the current context, the individual act of
destruction. If he does so, his critique will be dismissed as
swiftly, and as much by reflex: "he has crossed the barricades,"
that was the refrain about fellow- travelers who at last spoke
up; "he is an apostate" - that has been the refrain
in Islam for centuries about the rare Muslim who has dared to
raise even the slightest question that touches fundamentals.

To gauge the true content of that ideology
and its potential for evil, see what these authorities do when
they are in power: to ascertain what Communism actually means,
do not be lulled by the act that Communists have to put up in
a free and open polity such as ours; see what their gods did
in Stalin's Russia, in Mao's China; to gauge what Islam means,
see what Muslim rulers did in medieval India, what Iran went
through under Imam Khomeini, what the Taliban have been doing
in Afghanistan.

18. Terrorism is just a
weapon, it is just one among an array of weapons. To expect
that by killing one band of terrorists, smashing one network,
or even by reclaiming one country from the grip of an extremist
band, one has taken care of the problem is suicidal. The aim
of the terrorist is not to trigger one explosion, his fulfillment
is not in carrying out one assassination. The explosion and
assassination are instruments. The terrorist is himself an instrument,
he sees himself as an instrument - of history in Marxism-Leninism,
of me Will of Allah in Islam. For that reason to think that
by giving in over Chechnya, by making concessions to Hamas,
by handing Kashmir to them, one will effectively deal with "the
causes of Muslim anger" is to play the fool. For the believer
the "problem" is not Chechnya or Kashmir. The "problem"
is that fourteen centuries having passed, the world has not
yet accepted his creed - Marxism-Leninism, or Islam as the case
may be. His object is not the real estate of Chechnya or Kashmir,
or Jerusalem. His object - indeed, the duty which has been ordained
for him - is to convert the dar ul harb, the land of
war, that is the land the people of which have not yet submitted
to that creed, into the dar ul Islam. The believer cannot
remain true to his faith unless he persecutes the war till this
consummation is achieved.

Ideologues and propagandists
have a well-practiced division of labour in this regard. The
directors of the ideology intoxicate believers with visions
of how affairs will be ultimately - of how total domination
will be secured over the whole world. The propagandists addressing
the rest of the world, on the other hand, focus a narrow beam
— on the next, single objective: Palestine, Kashmir,
Chechnya. The beam is as blindingly intense as it is narrow:
the aim is to convince ordinary folk that if only this one concession
is made, all problems will cease. This focus and suggestion
is accompanied by a systematic campaign - through front-organizations,
intellectuals, fellow travelers - that raises an "intellectual"
debate, and thereby foments doubts in the minds of me victims
about the moral rights of the issue. The assault has two prongs.
On the one hand violence and terror: these aim at tiring out
the victims by inflicting death and carnage. Simultaneously,
doubts are fomented in the victims developed about the righmess
of their cause — these ripen into a rationale for capitulation;
why not yield a bit on Kashmir?, after all; this one gesture
will ensure peace, and we will be free to go our way after that;
in any case, the world is not entirely convinced of our case....
Victory on that one item in its pocket, the group commences
the same sequence on the next target: and doing so is but natural,
for the issue - Kashmir, Chechnya — was just an instrument.

19. Believers will inevitably
come to internalize this mindset – of unremitting violence —
whenever the ideology has the following ingredients:

Reality is simple;

It has been revealed to one person;

That person has put it in one Book;

Every syllable in that Book is divine, it
is the ultimate truth; anything that contradicts what is in
the Book is not just false, it is a device of the Devil, a
device to mislead and waylay the believer; nothing that is
not in the Book is of consequence;

The Book is difficult to fathom;

Therefore, believers require an intermediary
- the Party, the Church, the ulema;

Once all humans embrace the way of life that
the Book prescribes, eternal peace and prosperity will break
out; unless all embrace it, that dawn will not break;

It is, therefore, the duty of that intermediary
to invite you to accept the Faith - the dawat al Quran,
and its secular equivalents;

The truth of the message is so vivid that
if, in spite of the invitation, you do not embrace the faith,
that is itself proof that you are inherently evil; it is,
therefore, the duty of that intermediary, indeed it is the
duty of every ordinary adherent to put you out of harm's way;
for you are then blocking me march of History - in Marxism-Leninism,
you are blocking the Will of Allah, you and your obstinacy
are thwarting the dawn, and manifestly you are doing so because
of the evil in you;

As this is a duty ordained, it is but right
that the agent – of History, of Allah - use whatever means
are required to ensure that the Cause prevails.

Unless the rest of the world has come to consist
of docile imbeciles, these propositions inevitably entail violence
- the forms of violence that come to mind when we talk of terrorism
being just the weapon of choice for a particular circumstance,
a particular locale.

20. The faith has three further ingredients:

It forecloses alternatives to inevitable, protracted,
indeed eternal, and violent struggle. Allah, for instance, repeatedly
declares that unbelievers are congenitally perverse, that nothing
the faithful can possibly do will bring them round - for. He
says, I have Myself made them turn their faces away from Me;
indeed. He tells believers, I have deliberately put them in
your way to test you. They have but one aim. He tells believers;
to turn you away from your faith, to beguile you into becoming
like them, to deceive you into giving up your duty.

It drugs the faithful into believing that victory
is not just inevitable, it is imminent. Recall, the "imminent
collapse of capitalism" theses that were the staple of
Communist pamphleteering.

But as victory eludes the believers, the Faith
provides rationalizations, indeed consolations for failure.
It conditions the believer - in this case the terrorist - to
persevere in either event, in the face of defeat as much as
upon succeeding. When he succeeds, he is fortified in die belief
that Jehovah in the Old Testament, Allah in the Quran,
History in the Marxist texts, is on his side. When he fails,
the indoctrination leads him to believe that Jehovah, that Allah,
is just testing him - Allah wants to assess whether his faith
m Him will falter in the face of the setback. In the alternate "secular" religion, the adherent is conditioned to
believe that, as History moves dialectically, the setback will
itself create the conditions for eventual success.

Faced with such indoctrination, two things are
imperative:

Know the opiate, broadcast it before hand,
and thereby provide the spectacles through which me believer
will view the event;

Having forged the spectacles, do not just sit
back and hope that the believers will see events through diem.
In the wake of the engagement, especially when the terrorist
group has been subjected to a setback, show up the hollowness
of the rationalizations that the believers had internalised.

Of course, the group will have
its ways of shutting out the evidence of defeat. But even as it
does so, it will be weakening the foundations of falsehood on
which its edifice is built. Till the other day, Pakistani intellectuals
and ulema were projecting the Taliban as one of the great successes
- of the Army and the ISI who had secured "strategic depth"
for Pakistan, of Islam — for rulership of pure, idealist youngsters
had been established, a rulership that the people loved as it
had brought peace, as it had pulled them back from the abyss of
immorality and licentiousness. That was the refrain - day in and
day out for years. And then suddenly Pakistan was being told that
joining the campaign to crush the very same Taliban was a masterstroke.
The somersaults that the Comintern used to execute seemed so clever
at the time. Soon, they delegitimised the ideology itself.

21. The lethal potential of
these ideologies is now compounded by the fact that States such
as Pakistan have adopted terrorism as an instrument of State
policy. Musharraf has said in so many words, "Jehad
is an instrument of State policy." For such States
this is a particularly attractive proposition: it is war on
the cheap. The ideology that goes with adopting such means,
the spread of the gun-culture that invariably accompanies such
a strategy, eventually boomerangs - as the Talibanisation of
Pakistan shows. But m the meanwhile the decision of a State
to adopt terrorism as an instrument is certain to inflict enormous
costs on its neighbours. What was said of Mussolini's goons
is doubly true of terrorists: "they were nothing without
the State, but with it they were unstoppable." In a shrunken
world, all countries are the "neighbours" of such
a State - as the US has been reminded by the 11 September attacks.
The State that patronizes such governments or States should
wake up to the consequences its patronage will foment. In any
case, the immediate neighbours must.

Often a State can end up inflicting
grave injury on another even when it does not bear active hostility
towards its neighbour. For instance, the intelligence agencies
and sections of the Army of Bangladesh are so closely linked
to their counterparts in Pakistan that leaders and cadre of
groups such as ULFA operate in complete safety from them. Bhutan
and Myanmar exemplify a different sort of situation: the administrative
grip of these countries over their own territory is so loose
that terrorists operating in India are able to carve out their
own areas of influence in those countries.

22. As important as getting
at the State which patronizes terrorists is to get at their
networks. Terrorists have established numerous fronts: mosques,
madrasas, "research institutions", "charity
foundations". The range of persons and organizations against
whom the US and other countries had to move after the 11 September
attacks - from those that had been involved in managing finances
to those who had been providing safe houses - gave a glimpse
of how the networks, even of just one brand of terrorism, now
spread across the globe. Indeed, one of me devices they have
mastered is how to use religion and "religious bodies"
as fronts: Bhindranwale's conversion of the Golden Temple into
a headquarters for terror, eventually into a fortress, the use
of charities in Pakistan for raising laundering funds for jihadi
groups; the orchestrated appeals from across the globe that
the Americans suspend bombing during Ramzan.... For a society
to survive, it must have die gumption to tear these veils apart,
expose the fronts for what they are, and demolish them.

23. Terrorism constitutes a
threat to all: what is being inflicted on one country today
can be inflicted on another tomorrow. It is worse than imprudent,
therefore, for a State to consort with States that patronize,
finance, train, arm, give sanctuary to terrorists. For the same
reason, and as the evil are so well knit. States should share
their resources, in particular intelligence to combat terrorism.
That is what should be. In the real world, a country such as
India must remember that no one else is going to fight our war
for us.

24. For fighting that war
the sine qua non is: when the battle has been won, do not forget
those who delivered you - as, to our shame and misfortune, we
in India are in the habit of doing.

NOTES

Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was the architect
and original leader of the fundamentalist Sikh terrorism in
Punjab.

Approximately 257 persons were
killed and 713 others injured in the Bombay (now Mumbai) serial
blasts on March 12, 1993.

POTO: The Prevention of Terrorism
Ordinance, 2001.

On November 8, 1998, the Governor
of Assam, Lt. Gen. (Retd.) S K Sinha, submitted a report to
the Indian President, which estimated the total volume of illegal
migration from Bangladesh at six million people. See South Asia
Terrorism Portal; India; Documents; Assam; www.satp.org.

SULFA: Surrendered United Liberation
Front of Asom, surrendered cadres of the separatist United Liberation
Front of Asom

ULFA: United Liberation Front
of Asom. as heavily Talibanised as Pakistan - it would only
be compounding the problem